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want to be Sterritt, you’re Sterritt.’ But for their record keeping I was Sampson. The records are still there… in the basement. And they’re under the name Sampson. The Agency was very smart about all of that.” The pilots were watched during their time off, not so much to see what the men might be up to as to make sure KGB agents were not watching them. Detachment A pilots were given apartments in Hollywood, California, where they officially lived. During weekends they socialized at the Brown Derby Restaurant. “It was a gathering spot and the security people could keep an eye on us there,” Stockman explains. Come Monday morning, when it was time to return to Area 51, the Derby was the rendezvous spot because “it was one of the few places that was always open at five a.m.” The majority of the Derby clientele had been up all night; the six very physically fit, clear-eyed pilots with their Air Force haircuts, accompanied by two CIA handlers in sport jackets and bow ties, must have been a sight to behold. From there, the group drove the Cahuenga Pass through the Hollywood Hills to the Burbank airport, where they boarded a Lockheed airplane headed for the secret base. “At the time, we did not know of Lockheed’s involvement in the program,” Stockman explains. “Even that was concealed from us. We were called ‘drivers.’ There were a lot of reasons for it. At the time, I don’t think any of us really understood why, but that’s essentially what we were. We were just, by God, drivers. We were not glory boys.” The drivers did not have a need-to-know about anything except how to fly the airplane. Stockman once asked his superiors what the policy would be if he were shot down and captured. “Effectively, we were told that if we were captured and we were pressed by our captors, we could tell them anything and everything. Because of our lowly position as ‘drivers’ we didn’t know very much.” He said that during training even the name “Groom Lake was not part of our lexicon.”

Across the world, the Russians were busy working on their own form of espionage. If Area 51 had a Communist doppelgänger, it was a remote top secret facility forty miles northeast of Moscow called NII-88. There, a rocket scientist named Sergei Korolev—the Soviet Union’s own Wernher Von Braun—was working on a project that would soon shame American military science and propel the arms and space race into a sprint. Fearing the CIA would assassinate Russia’s key rocket scientist, Stalin declared Sergei Korolev’s name a state secret, which it remained until his death, in 1966. Sergei Korolev was only referred to as Chief Designer, not unlike the way Richard Bissell was known to employees outside the CIA only as Mr. B. Just as insiders called Area 51 the Ranch, NII-88 was known to its scientists as the Bureau. Like Area 51, NII-88 did not exist on the map. Before the Communist Revolution, NII-88 had been a small village called Podlipki, same as the Groom Lake area had once been a little mining enclave called Groom Mine. Both facilities began as outcroppings of tents and warehouses, accessible only to a short list of government elite. Both facilities would develop into multimillion-dollar establishments where multibillion-dollar espionage platforms would be built and tested, each having the singular purpose of outperforming what was being built on the other side.

In 1956, all the CIA knew of NII-88 was that it was the place where Russia kept dozens of its captured German scientists toiling away on secret science projects. These men were Russia’s version of America’s Paperclip scientists, and they included the four hundred German rocket scientists who’d been plied with alcohol and then seized in the middle of the night—just as former Messerschmitt pilot Fritz Wendel had said.

The CIA first learned about NII-88’s existence in late 1955, when the Soviets decided they had milked their former Third Reich scientists for all they were worth and began sending them back home. When the CIA learned of Russia’s repatriation program, the Agency leaped at the intelligence opportunity and